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This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationalism, and disciplinarity), which, it is contended, reduces critical thinking to polemic and makes it all but impossible to explore interconnected Jewish and postcolonial histories. The argument is illustrated with reference to postcolonial literature and by examining the disciplining of postcolonial and memory studies in relation to the Holocaust. A way out of the binary impasse, it is suggested, is to utilize as “traveling concepts” transcultural and transnational histories (such as “diaspora” and “ghetto”) that Jewish and postcolonial studies have in common.

Mamilla cemetery was one of the largest and most important Muslim cemeteries in Jerusalem. The plans to build a “Museum of Tolerance” in it led to heated protests and a prolonged legal procedure in Israel’s Supreme Court of Justice. In 2008, the court approved the plans and many hundreds of graves were exhumed. Through the available sources, including the court’s archival files, we discuss political, legal, and archaeological aspects of this case, focusing on ethics about cemeteries and descendant communities. The discussion shows that the Israel Antiquities Authority breached the court orders and that the treatment of the archaeological remains was biased. “Their” graves were destroyed, and the bones reburied in secret, while “our” remains in the same areas were carefully excavated and preserved. Tolerance to “our” heritage at the expense of “theirs” is intolerance.

In NTQ 123 (August 2015) Michael Walling, Artistic Director of Border Crossings, wrote about his production of This Flesh is Mine, adapted by Brian Woolland from the Iliad. Here he discusses When Nobody Returns, based on The Odyssey, a co-production with Palestine's Ashtar Theatre that reflected contemporary events in a way that was not allegorical but allusive. He explores how the play related to its 2016 context in terms of the refugee crisis, the idea of occupation, and the concept of return. As well as describing the generation of meaning through the interaction of text and context, the piece explores the production in relation to Border Crossings’ wider programme of work, which also includes community engagement with refugees and policy consultation.When Nobody Returns was written by Brian Woolland and co-produced by Border Crossings, Ashtar Theatre, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. It was funded by Arts Council England, British Council Palestine, RBKC's Nour Festival, Arts University Bournemouth, and Rose Bruford College.

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

This article examines the essential characteristics of the Palestine Mandate in the context of the League of Nations mandate system as a whole, pointing out its particular nature. It commences with a brief look at the Versailles environment and the relevance of the principle of self-determination, with an emphasis upon the development of the mandate system. The article then turns to consider the Palestine Mandate in its historical framework and the exceptionality of this Mandate. The distinction between the international allocation of the status of a territory and the determination of its boundaries is posited.

Dr Rabbi Isaac Breuer, a German jurist and Jewish rabbi, represented the ultra-orthodox community in Palestine before the international committees which considered the future of the Palestine Mandate. In his work, Breuer criticised the concept of sovereignty and introduced an alternative regime for global governance of developing peoples. His unique position, as analysed in this article, can contribute to contemporary debates surrounding the role of sovereigns as trustees of humanity, sovereignty and international law and ways of promoting global peace and human welfare.

By introducing Breuer's thought, this article seeks to contribute additional sources – both Jewish and universal – to these ongoing debates. Letting these neglected voices in international legal history enrich the debate can convince us, once again, of the importance of the periphery and of peripheral voices for the development, vitality and relevance of international law.

Breuer's model replaces the notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘rights’ with those of internalised obligations and subservience to law and justice. Limiting any national aspirations to total sovereignty, he implored the United Nations to refrain from elevating the Jewish national home to statehood. Opposing the Zionist position, he insisted that the Mandatory power and international institutions would enable two nations to develop side by side, in what he termed ‘the state of peace’, under international trusteeship.

We carefully draw on Breuer's insights to reflect on present debates on trusteeship, sovereignty and the management of areas devastated by conflict.

Can there be a general theoretical perspective on civil society's involvement in transitional justice? This article considers this question in its application to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Within the study of transitional justice and conflict resolution, civil society – a notoriously plastic concept – can be understood narrowly as rights-oriented groups working ‘for’ peace, but the term is equally available to describe a broader array of communities that can either promote or prevent peace and justice.

It is, in fact, quite difficult to sustain a theoretical distinction between them, because transitional justice does not escape the dictates of politics – of differing human desires expressed through power. Efforts to memorialise imply conflict over the particular memories to be privileged; claims for reparations are not only demands for justice, but for material redistribution that in turn may promote conflict. A narrow view of civil society problematically assumes we even know – let alone agree on – what constitutes positive change.

In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, that is a fraught proposition. Both an accurate definition of civil society and the valence of justice work slip beyond the narrow confines of the received model's assumptions: both Jewish and Palestinian groups mobilise a spectrum of resources from political engagement, to overseas support, to violent self-help. On both sides, civil society groups are instrumentalised to advance not an agenda of peace or justice in some abstract sense but a parochial claim that, seen from the other side, is, in fact, an obstacle to resolution. Indeed, there may be no peace or justice initiatives that can be analytically separated from efforts the purpose and effect of which is the very opposite of our conventional understanding of the field. The range from vocal activism to violent action, the spectrum of activation, commitment and radicalism, must be understood as fraught but connected and unbroken – as, at most, a kind of punctuated continuum.

The real work performed by civil society in promoting agendas of peace and justice cannot properly be understood without locating it in a defensible theoretical and empirical framework. Imagining a narrow civil society risks skewing our analysis of what civil society can do and actually does in relation to conflict. Civil society can clear the path to peace, or can provide the principal obstacles to it – it can simultaneously do both. In this it very much shares the ambiguous, multivalent profile of its classic counterpart: politics in the public sphere.

The rise of biblical archaeology, which came to dominate and control the archaeological investigation of Palestine, demonstrates how closely intertwined the study of the Bible and archaeology had become. European expansion opened up Palestine to much more extensive archaeological exploration. The European powers that were competing to control the land for strategic reasons were also competing to own and control its past. Political and economic power alone is never sufficient to maintain imperial adventures, cultural power is also required. Palestine's strategic importance to Britain in the struggle with France for control of the region was a crucial factor in the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865. The period from 1920s onwards is often referred to as the golden age of biblical archaeology, a time when many of the major sites were excavated and many of the great figures of archaeology and biblical studies shaped their disciplines.

While international humanitarian law envisages the possibility of holding formal thematic discussions, only United Nations General Assembly resolutions prompted the depositary of the Geneva Conventions to consult the High Contracting Parties on the opportuneness of conflict-specific conferences. Recalling the precedents of 1999 and 2001 – convened on the basis of the support expressed by the States Parties during related consultations – this article focuses on the Conference of High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 17 December 2014, which is likewise related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The result of the conference consists of a declaration reflecting the willingness of the States Parties to further implement Article 1 common to the four Geneva Conventions.

In the wake of the UN General Assembly's recent recognition of Palestinian statehood, the Palestinian government has made clear its intention to challenge in the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) the legality of Israeli settlements. This article explores jurisdictional hurdles for such a case. To focus on the jurisdictional issues, the article assumes for the sake of argument the validity of the merits of the legal claims against the settlements.

The ICC only takes situations of particular ‘gravity’. Yet settlements are not a ‘grave breach’ under the Rome Statute. No modern international criminal tribunal has ever prosecuted crimes that do not involve systematic violence and physical coercion. The ICC's gravity measure involves the number of persons killed; for settlements it would be zero. Indeed, the ICC Prosecutor triages situations by the numbers of victims; settlements do not appear to have direct individual victims. Finally, the ICC would at most have jurisdiction over settlement activity only from the date of Palestine's acceptance of jurisdiction. Settlement activity in this time frame would not immediately cross the ICC's gravity threshold.

The invention of the phonograph toward the end of the nineteenth century brought music to the forefront of folk-song scholarship, hitherto focused almost entirely on lyrics. Transformed into sound objects, the oral musical traditions, could be collected, stored, and subjected to sustained scholarly scrutiny. Musics are collected in the southeastern Mediterranean, west of the Jordan River, known variously as Eretz Yisrael, Israel, Palestine, and the Holy Land. This chapter focuses on the different ways in which collectors of traditional music have negotiated specific artistic and scholarly interests and agendas with competing ideologies of nationalism in four large scale music recording and archiving projects based in and around Jerusalem. In the utopian vision, spiritual renewal, attained through the creation of a society based on Jewish cultural and ethical values, was the primary goal of Zionism, and a prerequisite for political emancipation.

The Minoan Goddess was the dominant deity in the pantheon, and Minoan religion was virtually monotheistic. Popular scholarship and the feminist movement adopted the idea of the Mother Nature Goddess as a primeval deity going back to the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras. Crete was an independent island culture, which turned into a palatial society in the beginning of the second millennium BCE. The historical periods of Crete were divided into three main phases by Evans: Early Minoan, Middle Minoan, and Late Minoan. Minoan and Greek myths were both part of a larger religious pool, a koine, that lasted over three millennia in the Eastern Mediterranean. The type of shrine with benches and cult images is evident on the Mycenaean mainland, as well as in Syria and Palestine. In most ancient religions the act of worship involves sacrifice of animals or bloodless offerings to the gods.

Samaria and Judea were each organized around a temple controlled by a priestly aristocracy, and the ruling classes were interrelated and often intermarried. In the second century BCE, Judaism underwent fundamental changes. Early in this century, the Seleucid king Antiochus III defeated Ptolemy V at the Battle of Panium and gained control of Palestine. Alexandrian Judaism of third century BCE saw the translation of the Torah into Greek and the composition of the fragmentarily preserved work of Demetrius the Jewish chronographer. Despite Judaism's increased hostility to the pagan world, Hellenism had by the second century BCE made great inroads into Jewish society, not least in the Greek-speaking diaspora. Although it owed its position to a revolt against Antiochus's imposition of Hellenism, the Hasmonean court and its customs were deeply Hellenized. The Temple played a dominant role in Judaism in the Greco-Roman period; its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE marked the end of an era in Jewish history.

Straddling both the centres of (European) power and the shifting dynamics of the post-Ottoman world in a quest to guarantee private rights through public international legal redress, the PCIJ Mavrommatis case provides a rich resource for interrogating the extent to which international law during the League period could speak for voices on the edge of empire. In this article, historical consideration of the regimes of empire and Mandate form the backdrop to an exploration into how international legal discourse (re)configured the relationship between the core and the periphery, especially for those peoples awaiting the promise of self-determination and sovereignty. The figure of a lone Greek investor and his dashed hopes in the newly created Palestine Mandate is the backdrop to this tail of ever-shifting interpretations of public and private rights, of speech as well as silence before and beyond the Peace Palace.

This article examines the career of pioneer British psychoanalyst David Eder (1865–1936). Credited by Freud as the first practising psychoanalyst in England, active in early British socialism and then a significant figure in Zionism in post-war Palestine, and in between an adventurer in South America, a pioneer in the field of school medicine, and a writer on shell-shock, Eder is a strangely neglected figure in existing historiography. The connections between his interest in medicine, psychoanalysis, socialism and Zionism are also explored. In doing so, this article contributes to our developing understanding of the psychoanalytic culture of early twentieth-century Britain, pointing to its shifting relationship to broader ideology and the practical social and political challenges of the period. The article also reflects on the challenges for both Eder’s contemporaries and his biographers in making sense of such a life.

This paper is a sequel to Fischel and Kark's study on the private lands owned by Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842-1918, ruled 1876-1909) in Palestine and analyzes their fate after his forced abdication. In particular, we examine the court cases that arose around these lands, cases which were initiated by his heirs after 1920. For 28 years the heirs, led by his eldest son, Mohammad Selim and his daughter Amina Namika, approached half a dozen governments in the Middle East and Europe to regain the properties they claimed. The appeals represented a test of the British colonial legal system as well as issues of land settlement and the role of foreign courts in interpreting Turkish and Ottoman law. We furthermore examine the disposition of the sultan's lands from his abdication in 1909 to the last attempts by his heirs to recover them from the State of Israel in 1950, the general context of his lands in the Middle East as a whole, and the legal precedent set by the Mandatory Palestine court cases.

This paper surveys the private lands owned by of Sultan Abdülhamid II in Palestine and analyzes their spatial distribution and impact, in the context of regional imperial policy. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire faced serious external and internal problems. Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) used various traditional and modern methods in order to increase the internal cohesion of the empire and strengthen it vis-à-vis external threats.

One unique measure taken by the sultan was the purchase of large tracts of land. He became one of the largest landowners in the empire. In Palestine alone, the sultan purchased around 3% of the total area and initiated measures to increase these lands' productivity for his Privy Purse. In addition to gaining economic profit, Abdülhamid II employed his private lands to solve problems which challenged the sovereignty of the empire. These included attempts to settle the Bedouins, the establishment of new towns in order to subjugate nomads in regions where they threatened rural settlements, settling Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Balkans, and protecting strategically sensitive lands located on the frontiers, by purchasing them and thus keeping them out of the hands of others.

In the past fifty years there have been changes in relation to the nature and sources of international law. Academic lawyers have welcomed these changes, which show a movement away from strict consent as the basis of international law. States and government law advisers have adopted a more conservative approach and emphasize the importance of consent as a basis for international law. Different approaches are apparent in the practice of the Human Rights Council. The Council has focused on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, much to the annoyance of Western states. The developing world sees the Occupied Palestinian Territory in much the same way as the United Nations saw apartheid in South Africa. The International Court of Justice has responded wisely to both these phenomena. It has given cautious approval to new notions of international law, encapsulated in the doctrines of obligations erga omnes and jus cogens. On the subject of Palestine the Court has given an Advisory Opinion which should form the basis for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in the Middle East. Unfortunately the international community has failed to give effect to this opinion.

The Palestinian emergency healthcare system faces numerous difficulties in its efforts to develop and improve patient care. The Emergency Medical Assistance Project, a four-year, emergency health capacity-building project, is described in this report. The factors contributing to the current lack of inhospital emergency care and the measures performed to improve the situation are highlighted. The authors surveyed 48 emergency healthcare providers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on key emergency care development indicators and compared the level of emergency health development with those of Israel and the United States using a model of structured development criteria. Survey results and project observations provide a basis for future recommendations in education and infrastructure.